Friday, December 6, 2024

Preview: Newman on "The Glories of Mary for the Sake of Her Son"

For our first discussion of an Advent/Christmas sermon by Saint John Henry Newman, Anna Mitchell or Matt Swaim of the Son Rise Morning Show and I will celebrate the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on Monday, December 9! This feast has been transferred from its usual date, December 8 since it falls on the Second Sunday of Advent this year. It is still a Holy day of Obligation (or of Opportunity!) in most dioceses of the USA. 

I'll be on the air at my usual time! about 7:50 a.m. Eastern Time/6:50 a.m. Central Time. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

The Catholic sermon we'll reflect on "The Glories of Mary for the Sake of Her Son" was published in Newman's Discourses to Mixed Congregations in 1849, about five years before Pope Pius IX declared the doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception to be official Catholic Church teaching: 

We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful. Ineffabilis Deus, December 8, 1854
We are using the excerpt from this longer sermon as it appears in Waiting for Christ: Meditations for Christmas and Advent, edited by Christopher O. Blum.

Newman begins his discourse with the bold statement: "that the glories of Mary are for the sake of Jesus; and that we praise and bless her as the first of creatures, [so] that we may confess Him as our sole Creator."

Then this disciple of Saint Athanasius of Alexandra proclaims the Mystery of the Incarnation and how difficult it really is for us to wrap our minds around it and really believe it: "When the Eternal Word decreed to come on earth, He did not purpose, He did not work, by halves; but He came to be a man like any of us, to take a human soul and body, and to make them His own."

But when we consider not just that the Second Person of the Trinity was Incarnate as a man but how He came to us as man, we discover the mysterious historical reality: the Son of God is also the Son of Mary:
The world allows that God is man; the admission costs it little, for God is everywhere, and (as it may say) is everything; but it shrinks from confessing that God is the Son of Mary. It shrinks, for it is at once confronted with a severe fact, which violates and shatters its own unbelieving view of things; the revealed doctrine forthwith takes its true shape, and receives an historical reality; and 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 poetical expression, or a devotional exaggeration, or a mystical economy, or a mythical representation. 
Newman quotes both the Letter to the Hebrews and the First Letter of St. John the Apostle to demonstrate the particular bodily reality of the Incarnation: 
"Sacrifice and offering," the shadows of the Law, "you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me" (Hebrews 10:5). "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have diligently looked upon, and our hands have handled," (1 John 1:1), such is the record of the Apostle, in opposition to those who denied that "Jesus Christ had appeared in the flesh" (1 John 4:2).
Declaring that Mary is the Mother of God, the Theotokos, is a key to the reality of the Incarnation:
And the confession that Mary is the Mother of God is that safeguard wherewith we seal up and secure the doctrine of the Apostle from all evasion. It declares that He is God; it implies that He is man; it suggests to us that He is God still, though He has become man, and that He is true man though He is God. By witnessing to the process of the union, it secures the reality of the two subjects of the union, of the divinity and of the manhood. If Mary is the Mother of God, Christ must be literally Emmanuel, God with us.
From this mysterious reality, Newman declares, all the glories accorded to Mary, including her freedom from sin from the moment of her conception, are fitting, for "the sake of Jesus", her Son because:
If she is to witness and remind the world that God became man, she must be on a high and eminent station for the purpose. She must be made to fill the mind, in order to suggest the lesson. When she once attracts our attention, then, and not till then, she begins to preach Jesus. "Why should she have such prerogatives," we ask, "unless He be God? and what must He be by nature, when she is so high by grace?" This is why she has other prerogatives besides, namely, the gifts of personal purity and intercessory power, distinct from her maternity; she is personally endowed that she may perform her office well; she is exalted in herself that she may minister to Christ. 
Then Newman rehearses the defense of the the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception he would make in reply to E.B. Pusey in 1866: Mary is the Second Eve (as Jesus is the Second Adam); she would have the same privileges as Eve, the "mother of all the living" as Adam named her:
It was fitting that she should triumph, where Eve had failed, and should "bruise the serpent's head" by the spotlessness of her sanctity. In some respects, indeed, the curse was not reversed; Mary came into a fallen world, and resigned herself to its laws; she, as also the Son she bore, was exposed to pain of soul and body, she was subjected to death. 
But she was not put under the power of sin. As grace was infused into Adam from the first moment of his creation, so that he never had experience of his natural poverty, till sin reduced him to it; so was grace given from the first in still ampler measure to Mary, and she never incurred, in fact, Adam's deprivation. She began where others end, whether in knowledge or in love. She was from the first clothed in sanctity, destined for perseverance, luminous and glorious in God's sight, and incessantly employed in meritorious acts, which continued till her last breath. 
Hers was emphatically "the path of the righteous," which is "like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day" (Proverbs 4:18), and, sinlessness in thought, word, and deed, in small things as well as great, in venial matters as well as grievous, is surely but the natural and obvious sequel of such a beginning. If Adam might have kept himself from sin in his first state [or Eve hers!], much more shall we expect immaculate perfection in Mary. 
Such is her prerogative of sinless perfection, and it is, as her maternity, for the sake of Emmanuel.             
No wonder then that we ask the Mother of God to intercede for us:
If we have faith to admit the Incarnation itself, we must admit it in its fulness; why then should we be startled at the gracious appointments which arise out of it, or are necessary to it, or are included in it? If the Creator comes on earth in the form of a servant and a creature, why may not His Mother, on the other hand, rise to be the Queen of heaven, and be clothed with the sun, and have the moon under her feet?

For the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12, Blum has excerpted a similar sermon from the the Discourses to Mixed Congregations, "On the Fitness of the Glories of Mary."

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Tuesday, November 26, 2024

A Preview of a Preview: "Waiting for Christ" on the Son Rise Morning Show

Just to prepare you: After a Thanksgiving break, I'll start an Advent/Christmas series on the Son Rise Morning Show on Monday, December 9 (which this year is the feast of the Immaculate Conception, a Holy Day of Obligation transferred from its usual date of December 8, the Second Sunday of Advent this year). 

Anna Mitchell or Matt Swaim and I will discuss four sermons by Saint John Henry Newman: on December 9th and 16th, and then after the show's Christmas holiday break, on January 6th and 13th. I'll be on the air at my usual time! about 7:50 a.m. Eastern Time/6:50 a.m. Central Time.

We'll use the edited/excerpted sermons from Waiting for Christ: Meditations for Advent and Christmas, from Ascension Press, which I reviewed for the National Catholic Register in 2018.

If you're still looking for Advent/Christmas spiritual reading, the book is available here from the Augustine Institute, other on-line sellers, and, I hope, at your local Catholic bookstore!

Friday, November 22, 2024

Preview: Father Faber on "What We Should Give Thanks For"

In our final Son Rise Morning Show segment on Father Frederick Faber's Little Book of Holy Gratitude, drawn from the seventh chapter of All For Jesus, on Monday, November 25, Matt or Anna and I will look at some of Faber's thoughts about what exactly we should thank God for. 

I'll be on the air at my usual time! about 7:50 a.m. Eastern Time/6:50 a.m. Central Time. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

Faber begins in an intriguing direction, since we might be inclined to concentrate on the blessings we individually have received:

"We should thank God for the blessings that are common to the whole human race."

Among those blessings Faber lists that we are created with a body and a soul; health and temporal blessings; that "God not only created the world, he redeemed it, and prepared for us eternal glory, and He thinks specifically and distinctly of each one of us." Faber highlights "the graces of the sacred humanity of Jesus, the glorious privileges of the Mother of God, and all the splendor of the angels and the saints" as worthy of our gratitude.

He lists other things and events to be thankful for:

--Personal Blessings Received

--Afflictions and Tribulations

--Trifling Blessings

--Blessings We've Obstructed

--God's Non rational Creatures (birds, dogs, horses, even cats!)

--Blessings Given to Our Enemies

--All God's Angels and Saints

--The Gift of Faith

Some of these suggestions might seem odd. Why should we be thankful for our troubles? Because we trust that God only wants what's best for us. How do we thank God for blessings we didn't receive through our own fault? Because He wanted to bless us and we thank Him for that, Faber says. Faber comments that the non-rational creatures whose presence we enjoy are signs of "the presence of God, enabling us everywhere, and at all times, to rise to Him by means of his creatures." Being thankful for the blessings our enemies--if we have any--is a great act of charity and "brotherly love", Faber advises, as we will eventually feel "gentleness and tenderness, even toward those who have wronged us most, or who show the greatest dislike of us." Thus, we will be at peace with them and within ourselves.

In our era of the "nones" I think the gift of faith is one of the greatest things to be thankful for: To trust in God's holiness, truthfulness, and mercy; to be certain that He loves me and wants me to be happy; that He established His Church on earth to guide me to Heaven. Those are great blessings.

Most of all, of course, Faber returns to how thankful we should be for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, for the Real Presence, and for Holy Communion:

In our thanksgiving after receiving Holy Communion, he emphasizes the gratitude we should express for "the adorable Sacrifice of the Mass and the Personal Presence of Jesus with His Church," because "wheresoever He is, there is infinite praise, unspeakable worship, unfathomable thanksgiving!" He recommends the guidance of Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Alphonsus Liguori, and his own patron, Saint Philip Neri for different means and methods.
 

After urging Catholics to "think more immediately of the Blessed Sacrament and of the presence of Jesus within them at that moment", Faber closes this section on thanksgiving after receiving Holy Communion by citing the opening words of Canto 27 of Paradise in the Divine Comedy , when Dante is coming closer to the heights of heaven, as an image for meditation after Holy Communion:. 

Then “Glory to the Father, to the Son,
And to the Holy Spirit,” rang aloud
Throughout all Paradise, that with the song
My spirit reel’d, so passing sweet the strain:
And what I saw was equal ecstasy;
One universal smile it seem’d of all things,
Joy past compare, gladness unutterable,
Imperishable life of peace and love,
Exhaustless riches and unmeasur’d bliss.
--Henry Francis Cary translation (1805-1814)

Who wouldn't be grateful for that?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Friday, November 15, 2024

Preview: Father Faber on the Holy Gratitude of the Saints

On Monday, November 18, we'll continue our Son Rise Morning show series on Father Frederick Faber's Little Book of Gratitude, drawn from the seventh chapter of All For Jesus, with a focus on how the canonized saints "Ever Gave Thanks to God". I'll be on the air at my usual time! about 7:50 a.m. Eastern Time/6:50 a.m. Central Time. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

As Faber begins the chapter: "Thanksgiving has been in all ages the characteristic of the saints. Thanksgiving has been their favorite prayer . . . ." and then he offers several examples of saints, familiar and unfamiliar to readers in our time, at least, starting with Saint Laurence Justinian, the first Patriarch of Venice, whose feast is no longer celebrated on the universal Roman Calendar:

Bishop and first Patriarch of Venice, b. in 1381, and d. 8 January, 1456. He was a descendant of the Giustiniani, a Venetian patrician family which numbered several saints among its members. Lawrence's pious mother sowed the seeds of a devout religious life in the boy's youth. In 1400 when he was about nineteen years old, he entered the monastery of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine on the Island of Alga near Venice. In spite of his youth he excited admiration by his poverty, mortifications, and fervour in prayer. At that time the convent was changed into a congregation of secular canons living in community. After his ordination in 1406 Lawrence was chosen prior of the community, and shortly after that general of the congregation. He gave them their constitution, and was so zealous in spreading the same that he was looked upon as the founder. His reputation for saintliness as well as his zeal for souls attracted the notice of Eugene IV and on 12 May, 1433, he was raised to the Bishopric of Castello. The new prelate restored churches, established new parishes in Venice, aided the foundation of convents, and reformed the life of the canons. But above all he was noted for his Christian charity and his unbounded liberality. All the money he could raise he bestowed upon the poor, while he himself led a life of simplicity and poverty. He was greatly respected both in Italy and elsewhere by the dignitaries of both Church and State. He tried to foster the religious life by his sermons as well as by his writings. . . . Lawrence was named the first Patriarch of Venice, and exercised his office till his death somewhat more than four years later. His beatification was ratified by Clement VII in 1524, and he was canonized in 1690 by Alexander VIII. Innocent XII appointed 5 September for the celebration of his feast. The saint's ascetical writings have often been published, first in Brescia in 1506, later in Paris in 1524, and in Basle in 1560, etc. We are indebted to his nephew, Bernardo Giustiniani, for his biography.

Faber cites his Treatise on Obedience:
Whosoever should try to lay open all God's blessings to the full would be like a man trying to confine in a little vase the mighty currents of the wide ocean; for that would be an easier work than to publish with human eloquence the innumerable gifts of God. . . . They are to be confessed with the month, revered in the heart, and religiously worshipped, as far as the littleness of man can do. . . .

Only let God see you are thankful for what He has given you, and He will bestow more gifts upon you, and better gifts.
Among more familiar saints, perhaps, Faber mentions Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Bridget of Sweden, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Mary Magdalene of Pazzi, Saint Bonaventure, and Saint Gregory of Nyssa.

Citing a revelation to Saint Bridget, Faber again emphasizes the connection between thanksgiving and Holy Communion:
Our Lord gives the increase of thanksgiving as a reason to St. Bridget for the sacrifice of the Mass. "My body," says He, "is daily immolated on the altar, that men may love me so much the more, and more frequently call to mind my blessings."
In his own words, Faber urges his readers to "meditate for a few minutes on the Eternal Word", the "Second Person, the eternally begotten Word of the Father, the splendor of His Majesty, uncreated Wisdom, the same Person who was incarnate and crucified for us, the same who sent us the Holy Spirit, who gave us Mary, who gives us Himself in the Blessed Sacrament . . . then think what His liberalities must be--no bound or measure to them. We cannot count their number, nor exhaust their fullness, nor understand their excellence . . ."

Through this kind of meditation, Faber says, we will "increase our devotion to His most dear humanity, and to learn how to watch at His Crib, to weep over His Cross, to worship at His tabernacle, and to nestle in His Sacred Heart."

The last saint Father Faber quotes is Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who urges us to be grateful for our past, our present, and our future because the blessings we've received and will receive are all from God:
That you were born was His blessing; and after you were born, your life and your death were, as the apostle Paul says, [in Romans 14:8, "If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord."] equally His blessing. Whatever your future hopes may be, they hang also upon His blessing.

Finally, Faber promises to help his readers to understand the "principal blessings for which we are bound continually to thank God" in the next chapter, "What We Should Give Thanks For."

Image Source (Public Domain): Portrait of Saint Lawrence Justinian by Gentile Bellini.

Friday, November 8, 2024

Preview: Father Faber on the Neglect of Gratitude

On Monday, November 11, Veterans Day here in the USA, Armistice or Remembrance Day (the end of World War I in the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month) in Europe and the Commonwealth, and the feast of Saint Martin of Tours, we'll continue our series on Father Frederick Faber's Little Book of Gratitude with chapter 3, "We Neglect Gratitude More Than Prayer". In All for Jesus (the 2000 Sophia Institute Press edition), much of this material is found on pages 164-174.

I'll be on the air at my usual time! about 7:50 a.m. Eastern Time/6:50 a.m. Central Time. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.


We pray, Faber concedes, because "our own interests drive us obviously to prayer; but it is love alone that leads us to thanksgiving."

Faber is concerned that when we pray for some need or blessing, we may not offer thanks and praise when our prayer has been granted--he cites the case of the ten lepers in Gospel of St. Luke (17:12-19)--because all ten were cleansed, but only one (the Samaritan, an outcast among the outcasts) returns to thank Jesus. And this stuns the "Sacred Heart of Jesus" Faber notes.

Citing St. Paul's letters to the Ephesians, Corinthians, etc., he emphasizes that our thanksgiving should be constant. He advises this pattern of praise and thanksgiving is a "preparation for our real life in heaven" and that "the Church on earth reflects the Church in heaven" as "the worship of the one is the echo of the worship of the other." 

That, of course, brings us to the Eucharist, "a sacrifice of thanksgiving" and Faber emphasizes that "The Spirit of the Eucharist must be found everywhere." As we practice gratitude during the Mass it will increase our love of God and the "neglect of it betokens how little love we have."

Faber even cautions us not to think so badly of fallen-away Catholics who don't receive the Sacraments, but examine our own lack of fervor in thanksgiving. He warns against lukewarmness in view of all the blessings we've received and encourages meditation, pondering "things as Mary did", to "treasure up God's mercies, and make much of them."

As Faber had been a Calvinist before his days as a Tractarian and a Catholic Oratorian priest, the last section in this chapter is important. He contrasts the dark side of God's severity and majesty and how we know little of it because "He has told us so little about it" with how much He has told us about His love:
When love is in question, He has been copious, explicit, minute. He explains, He repeats, He gives reasons, He argues, He persuades, He complains, He invites, He allures, He magnifies.

Of His rigor He drops but a word now and then . . . He startles only out of love . . . 

There is no end to the variety of the disclosures of His goodness, the inventions of His compassion, and the strangeness of His yearning over His creatures. . . .

Faber urges his readers not to dwell on "predestination and eternal punishment" but instead "ponder all those numberless signs of our heavenly Father's love" and be truly thankful.

Image Source (Public Domain): James Tissot's "The Healing of the Ten Lepers"

Friday, November 1, 2024

For November: Father Frederick Faber on "Holy Gratitude"

Anna Mitchell asked me to discuss and bring out highlights from a book published by Sophia Institute Press by Father Frederick Faber, The Little Book of Holy Gratitude, on the Son Rise Morning Show throughout November. We'll start our discussion with some biographical information about Father Faber on Monday, November 4. I'll be on the air at my usual time! about 7:50 a.m. Eastern Time/6:50 a.m. Central Time. 

Don't forget to "Fall Back" on Sunday as it applies in the USA and Canada!

Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

Father Frederick Faber was born and raised according to the religion of the Church of England; he was a convert and an Oratorian like Saint John Henry Newman. He and Newman, indeed, have much in common, although they did not always see eye-to-eye on certain matters, even as Catholics and Oratorians. Faber was born on June 28, 1814 and died on September 26, 1863 after suffering from Bright's disease. Like Newman, Faber had Huguenot ancestors and for a time he held Calvinist views of salvation; like Newman, Faber endured some setbacks in his academic career at Oxford, not quite achieving his goals. Like Newman, he was ordained a deacon and then a minister in the Church of England; like Newman, when he travelled on the Continent, he was at first disturbed by Catholic piety and worship.

Then he began to follow Newman, inspired by the Parochial and Plain Sermons, and became a follower of the Tractarian Movement. He vacationed in the Lake District, wrote poetry, and was befriended by William Wordsworth!

This 2013 tribute Faber posted on the New Liturgical Movement website describes what happened next:

In 1843 Faber was inducted into the University College living of Elton in Huntingdonshire. During the years 1839-43 he made two continental tours, and his letters give striking poetic descriptions of the scenes he visited; they glow with enthusiasm for Catholic rites and devotion. [Notice the change in attitude!] In Rome he was received in audience by Pope Gregory XVI and acquired a devotion to St Philip Neri [!], whose life he translated at Elton, where he turned his household servants into a brotherhood. He established the practice of confessions, preached Catholic doctrine, and wrote the life of St Wilfrid, controversially openly advocating the claims and supremacy of Rome. He was greatly loved by his people. It was only Newman’s influence that prevented him from entering the Church.

But on 9 October 1845, Newman was received into the Church at Littlemore. In November, with Francis Knox and ten other friends and servants, Faber was received into the Church at Northampton by Bishop William Wareing, vicar apostolic of the eastern district. They settled in Birmingham, where they informally organized themselves as a religious community, calling themselves the Brothers of the Will of God, or ‘Wilfridians’ (as they were mischievously called by St [Blessed] Dominic Barberi) from St Wilfrid, their patron, at Cotton Hall, near Cheadle, Staffordshire, the gift of the Earl of Shrewsbury.

Given that devotion to Saint Philip Neri, it makes sense that once Newman brought the Oratory to England, Faber and his followers were interested. Newman established the London (Brompton) Oratory (the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) in 1849, and Faber was named its Provost. The Brompton Oratory posts these comments about Father Faber:
Faber the preacher, Faber the hymn-writer, Faber the spiritual author, must all give way to Faber the founder and first Provost of the London Oratory. Father Faber became an influential figure in the London of his day. His enthusiastic and, some might say, faintly flamboyant personality might lend itself to unsympathetic treatment by those who do not understand him, and by those who do not read his books. In the words of his early biographer, Fr. John Bowden [Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's brother], Faber's life was "from first to last religious". His character was not something fixed or static. His letters display a growing maturity of outlook. In this he may be fairly said to exemplify the wise insight of Newman himself who said that to be human is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. Faber described Newman as "the greatest scholar since St. Augustine" and referred to Newman as the one "who taught me all the good I know". 

Father Faber never enjoyed very good health and sometimes travelled to warmer climates (Malta or Italy) at his doctor's advice; he died at the rather young age of 49. He wrote many books of devotion and like Newman and other Oratorians (for example Edward Caswall), wrote and translated hymns for congregational singing at Mass and Vespers, so commonly celebrated on Sundays with Benediction at the Oratory. Among his famous hymns are "Faith of Our Fathers" (with its tribute to the Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation), "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy", "Jesus, My Lord, My God, My All"--

Jesus, my Lord, my God, my All,
How can I love thee as I ought?
And how revere this wondrous gift,
So far surpassing hope or thought?
Sweet Sacrament, we thee adore;
Oh, make us love thee more and more.
Oh, make us love thee more and more.

Had I but Mary's sinless heart
To love thee with, my dearest King,
Oh, with what bursts of fervent praise
Thy goodness, Jesus, would I sing.
Sweet Sacrament, we thee adore;
Oh, make us love thee more and more.
Oh, make us love thee more and more.

Thy Body, Soul, and Godhead, all,
O mystery of love divine.
I cannot compass all I have,
For all thou hast and art are mine.
Sweet Sacrament, we thee adore;
Oh, make us love thee more and more.
Oh, make us love thee more and more.

--and several hymns praising the Mother of God and St. Joseph.

The chapters in The Little Book of Holy Gratitude are drawn from chapter seven "Offer Thanks to God", of one of Father Faber's most popular books, All for Jesus: The Easy Way of Divine Love. He also translated St. Louis de Montfort's famous True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and wrote several other devotional works.

In just the two pages of one chapter, "Thankful Souls Are Happy" from the Sophia edition, Father Faber weaves a tapestry of virtue for us to examine. 

He begins with the models of the virtue of gratitude: the Blessed Virgin Mary, the patriarch Jacob, and King David. They remembered the blessings they'd received, meditated upon them, and, in the case of David, sang "of old mercies and [made] much of them" in the Psalms.

He also highlights the connection between our awareness of God's mercy in forgiving our sins and our thanksgiving: "a very grateful man is also a deeply penitent man".

Faber outlines the many virtues of gratitude to God and how they make us happy, because as we practice gratitude we begin to look for reasons to be grateful, even when they're not immediately apparent!, like seeing some slight delay as providential because we therefore weren't on the site of an accident when it happened, or we were blessed to see a friend we wouldn't have if we'd arrived earlier at our destination! 

The virtues expressed in holy gratitude: "promptitude of obedience, heroic effort, joyful perseverance". Holy Gratitude is "loyalty to God".

"Happy the man whose life is one long Te Deum"! he writes--constantly praising and thanking God with the Angels, the Cherubim, the Seraphim, the Apostles, the Prophets, and the Martyrs.

Faber says when we show this gratitude and rejoice in God's blessings, it's apostolic (evangelistic) because "it wins souls", and it "preaches God unconsciously".

"Joy is not a solitary thing!". he proclaims, as we share it.

There's much in these pages to meditation upon and discuss.

Friday, October 25, 2024

Preview: Newman on "How to Read the Fathers of the Church", Part Two

Last week I ended my post with the comment that after his "Monophysite mirror" moment, Saint John Henry Newman had a problem. 

Antiquity, meaning the early Church and the Fathers of the Church, was the foundation upon which he wanted to build the Anglican Via Media, but that foundation was crumbling. 

So in this second look on the Son Rise Morning Show at how Newman learned to read the Fathers of the Church, Anna Mitchell or Matt Swaim and I will examine what Newman did next. I'll be on the air Monday, October 28 at my usual time, about 7:50 a.m. EDT/6:50 a.m. CDT. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

Father Joseph Carola's chapter on John Henry Newman in Engaging the Church Fathers in Nineteenth-Century Catholicism: The Patristic Legacy of the "Scuola Romana", published by Emmaus Academic, provides us with excellent insight into Newman's reading of the Fathers, and what he did after he realized that Antiquity was not enough. 

He includes a partial quotation from the 1875 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, which I quote in full from chapter 2, "The Ancient Church":
In truth, this fidelity to the ancient Christian system, seen in modern Rome, was the luminous fact which more than any other turned men's minds at Oxford forty years ago to look towards her with reverence, interest, and love. It affected individual minds variously of course; some it even brought on eventually to conversion, others it only restrained from active opposition to her claims; but none of us could read the Fathers, and determine to be their disciples, without feeling that Rome, like a faithful steward, had kept in fulness and in vigour what our own communion had let drop. (p. 198)

 As Father Carola notes, 

By the early 1840s Newman's thought had clearly evolved from an effectively static vision of Christian antiquity to a dynamic understanding of doctrinal development. The Fathers had shown him that antiquity, while remaining normative, does not stand as an absolute rule in itself. The Fathers themselves point to the judgment of the living Church in every age. (p. 89)

In September of 1841, Newman moved out of Oxford to The College in Littlemore: he was as he said "on his deathbed" in the Church of England because he did not see in it "the living Church"--but was it in the Catholic Church, the feared and mistrusted 'Church of Rome'? 

By the Summer of 1843, this chronology of his life tells us that "Newman’s doubt about the Church of England is greater than his doubt about the Roman Church". From that date until October 9, 1845, Newman began to cut off more and more of his ties to the Church of England and Oxford, resigning his positions at St. Mary's and Oriel, while he prayed and studied Church History and the Fathers.

Because after that Monophysite crisis, Newman had faced another problem when he read Father Nicholas Wiseman's article about the Donatist heresy in the Dublin Review. Wiseman had cited Saint Augustine's dictum "Securus judicat orbis terrarum" (the whole world judges surely). 

Carola writes: that "axiom from one of antiquity's prime oracles decided, as far as Newman was concerned, against antiquity as an absolute rule in itself in favor of a temporal-geographical principle of magisterial catholicity," (p. 137) While Newman could temporarily argue that even Saint Augustine's statement can't be taken 'as an absolute rule' on its own, he soon had to acknowledge there was a "continuity-in-development that accounts for legitimate growth in Catholic doctrine and practice over the ages." (p. 139)

And so, at Littlemore, Newman studied the Fathers of the Church in a yet another way as he analyzed the development of doctrine during the first six centuries of Church History. Newman found in that history and in the Fathers a pattern of valid development in the Catholic Church. 

Where before he thought there was corruption, he found "continuity-in-development" as the Fathers and the Councils and the Magisterium dealt with both heresies that threatened and the growth in understanding the deposit of faith. According to his tests or notes of preservation of type, assimilation, logical sequence, etc., described in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman found chronic vigor in the Catholic Church he did not find in the Church of England or elsewhere.

Father Carola makes the interesting comment on page 143 that after Newman became a Catholic and priest of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, he continued his studies in "an unfolding doctrinal development" and sought "such continuity between the Church Fathers and the medieval Schoolman, especially Thomas Aquinas." Despite that "engagement with scholastic thought, the Church Fathers always remained Newman's first love".

Thus in his 1866 Letter Addressed to the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D.,on Occasion of His Eirenicon, Newman could write:

For myself, hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of their times is not yet an old almanac to me. Of course I maintain the value and authority of the "Schola," as one of the loci theologici; nevertheless I sympathize with Petavius** in preferring to the "contentious and subtle theology" of the middle age, that "more elegant and fruitful teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite Antiquity." The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now, as it was twenty years ago. Though I hold, as you know, a process of development in Apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them. (p. 24)
**Petavius, Denis Pétau (August 21, 1583 to December 11, 1652), also known as Dionysius Petavius, was a French Jesuit theologian. More about him here, if you are interested. The very fact that Newman read Petavius, who wrote about the history of doctrine among other subjects, demonstrates the validity of Carola's comment above!

In his biographic sketch of Newman's life, Father Carola mentions that Newman ended his publishing career where he began it, "with the Alexandrian Fathers" when he published an updated edition of Saint Athanasius' treatises against the Arians in 1881, nine years before his death. (p. 91)

This seems like an appropriate place to end this Son Rise Morning Show series on Newman and the Fathers of the Church. 

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Friday, October 18, 2024

Preview: Newman on "How to Read the Fathers of the Church", Part One

We'll continue our series on the Son Rise Morning Show exploring how Saint John Henry Newman studied and learned from the Fathers of the Church on Monday, October 21. As a reminder, this series was inspired by a course at the Institute of Catholic Culture, Patristics 102 "Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers" running now; Anna Mitchell (who is the Program Assistant for ICC) asked me to explore how the Fathers of the Church influenced Newman's theology and contributed to his conversion to Catholicism and share what I learned. As he famously said, "The Fathers made me Catholic", so I've always (since 1979!) known this is an important theme in Newman studies.

On Monday, October 21, we'll talk about Newman's first unsuccessful attempt to the read the Fathers systematically and then his second more successful effort to the Fathers and how he advised others how to follow his lead. I'll be on the air at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later (and remember you may subscribe to the SRMS daily Show Notes email there too).

I'm indebted for these insights today to Father Joseph Carola, SJ and his book Engaging the Church Fathers in Nineteenth-Century Catholicism: The Patristic Legacy of the "Scuola Romana", published by Emmaus Academic. I read this review in the Summer 2024 issue of Word on Fire's The New Ressourcement Journal. If you read the first paragraph of that review, you'll see why I had to buy and read the book. I admit I skipped directly to the chapter on Newman, then read the next chapter on Giovanni Perrone, the Jesuit scholar Newman consulted on his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and other related Patristic issues.

Newman began to read the Fathers systematically in 1828, but he ran into trouble. Later, he wrote to Robert Wilberforce that 
It is so difficult to read without an object. I may almost add so unprofitable--but I rather mean this--that nothing at all is done, if a man begins to read the Fathers without a previous knowledge of the controversies which are built upon them . . . I read Justin [Martyr] very carefully in 1828--and made copious notes--but I conceive most of my time was thrown away. I was like a sailor landed at Athens or Grand Cairo, who stares about--does not know what to admire, what to examine--makes random remarks, and forgets all about when he is gone. (Letters & Diaries, Vol. 5, 133, quoted on pages 109-110)

In 1838, in an article in the January issue of The British Critic, "The Theology of Saint Ignatius [of Antioch]" (whose feast we just celebrated on November 17) Newman gave some more instruction on how to read the Fathers, repeating the same analogy of the traveler not knowing enough about the city she's visiting to appreciate its sights and their significance. He contends that when the reader--as he had first done--tries to impose her own views on the Fathers, she won't benefit from the experience:
Thus they are ever at cross-purposes with the author they are studying; they do not discern his drift; and then, according as their minds are more or less of a reverent character, they despise or excuse him. At best they call him "venerable," which means out of date and useless. We have known one whom all would have acknowledged to be at the time deeply versed in the Fathers, yet taken by surprise by the question whether bishops and priests were the same or distinct orders in the early Church? as not having even contemplated the question. Again, we know a person who, when he entered on them, read and analyzed Ignatius, Barnabas, Clement, Polycarp, and Justin, with exceeding care, but who now considers his labour to have been all thrown away, from the strange modern divisions under which he threw the matter he found in them. (p. 226)
That "a person" sounds like Newman himself! He goes on to tell his readers of one particular pitfall, trying to find support for particular Protestant doctrines in the Fathers of the Church:
Whatever then be the true way of interpreting the Fathers, and in particular the Apostolical Fathers, if a man begins by summoning them before him, instead of betaking himself to them,—by seeking to make them evidence for modem dogmas, instead of throwing his mind upon their text, and drawing from them their own doctrines,—he will to a certainty miss their sense. (p. 228)
What Newman recommends instead is that the student first study Church History and Theology. The student should know what the Fathers mean by certain terms by studying the vocabulary, and divest herself of "modern ideas and prejudices." (p. 233)

Father Carola describes how Newman wrote to Thomas William Allies in September of 1842 and described an even more exact method: study a "particular controversy in the Fathers" like Donatism. Study the history of that heresy, its terms and context, so you know what the issues were, what the Fathers were dealing with, how they were defending the teaching of the Church against errors in that case. He told Allies to read "the worthwhile tracts of Optatus of Milevis and Augustine of Hippo" in connection to the Donatist heresy. Newman suggested to Allies that it's best to "get a footing in some one place, and then proceed as our particular taste or curiosity leads." (pages 135-136, quoting Letters and Diaries, vol. IX, p. 119)

BTW: T.W. Allies (1813–1903) was received into the Catholic Church in 1850. Note how the 1912 Dictionary of National Biography describes his path into the Catholic Church: 
Study of the Fathers, and especially of Suarez's work, 'De Erroribus Sectæ Anglicanæ,' combined with the Gorham decision on baptismal regeneration in 1850, shattered his faith in the established church, and in his 'Royal Supremacy' (1850) he forcibly presented the Roman point of view (cf. Liddon's Life of E. B. Pusey, iii. 257 seq.). In October 1850 he resigned his Launton living and joined the Roman communion.

The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article about Allies, written by his daughter Mary, also mentions his reading the Fathers of the Church: 

The Fathers, especially St. Augustine, revealed to him the Catholic Church. Moreover, they revealed him to himself, and when he now set pen to paper it was to write prose. He thought to find Anglicanism in the Fathers, and his first book is the result of this delusion. It was entitled "The Church of England Cleared from the Charge of Schism", published in 1846, a second and enlarged edition appearing in 1848. It gives the key-note of his lifelong labour and the whole question between Anglican and Catholic in a nutshell. As he perceived early in the day, the choice of the Royal Supremacy or Peter's Primacy constitutes the kernel of the entire controversy.

That choice of the Royal Supremacy in the Gorham Judgment, when the Queen's Council overrode the decision of the bishops of the Church of England, led Allies (and Henry Manning and others) to the Catholic Church.

How he advised Allies seems to have been Newman's method: assigned to write a book about the First Ecumenical Councils and the development of the Doctrine of the Trinity, he focused on the Arian Heresy and thus wrote The Arians of the Fourth Century in 1832, an effort that led him to further controversy in later years when he wrote Consulting the Laity on Matters of Doctrine in 1859, noting the faithfulness of laity during the Arian divisions in the Church.

Nevertheless, when in the summer of 1839 he started to study the Monophysite heresy and the Fathers of the Church defending the Church's true teaching on the Person of Jesus Christ and His two Natures, Human and Divine, Newman, like Allies as described above, read Pope St. Leo the Great and other Fathers to find support for his theory of the Via Media in the midst of the Fathers. He sought to find evidence that the Church of England was an Apostolic Church, in union with the Church Catholic from the beginning, in spite of its late establishment in the 16th century.

But we know that's not what he found. He described that crucial reading of the Monophysite crisis and its results in his Apologia pro Vita Sua in 1864/65, but he also spoke to his former Tractarian colleagues in the  lectures he presented in 1850 on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered Volume I (In Twelve Lectures addressed in 1850 to the Party of the Religious Movement of 1833), in Lecture 12:

After this I set myself to the study of [the Fathers of the Church], with the view of pursuing the series of controversies connected with our Lord's Person; and to the examination of these controversies I devoted two summers, with the interval of several years between them (1835 and 1839). And now at length I was reading them for myself; for no Anglican writer had specially and minutely treated the subjects on which I was engaged. On my first introduction to them I had read them as a Protestant; and next, I had read them pretty much as an Anglican, though it is observable that, whatever I gained on either reading, over and above the theory or system with which I started, was in a Catholic direction. In the former of the two summers above mentioned (1835), my reading was almost entirely confined to strictly doctrinal subjects, to the exclusion of history, and I believe it left me pretty much where I was on the question of the Catholic Church; but in the latter of them (1839) it was principally occupied with the history of the Monophysite controversy, and {373} the circumstances and transactions of the Council of Chalcedon, in the fifth century, and at once and irrevocably I found my faith in the tenableness of the fundamental principle of Anglicanism disappear, and a doubt of it implanted in my mind which never was eradicated. I thought I saw in the controversy I have named, and in the Ecumenical Council connected with it, a clear interpretation of the present state of Christendom, and a key to the different parties and personages who have figured on the Catholic or the Protestant side at and since the era of the Reformation.
I can't resist quoting Newman's vivid reaction to that summer of 1839 from chapter 3 "History of My Religious Opinions from 1839 to 1841" of his Apologia pro Vita Sua:

I have described in a former work [cited above!], how the history affected me. My stronghold was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite. The Church of the Via Media was in the position of the Oriental communion, Rome was where she now is; and the Protestants were the Eutychians. (p. 114) 

So studying the Fathers of the Church to find the authority for certain Church teachings about Jesus and His Church Catholic was not enough. There had to be something more. Father Carola's book will guide us further in our next discussion on October 28.  

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image Credit (Public Domain): An icon of Ignatius of Antioch from the Menologion of Basil II (c. 1000 AD)

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

H.C. White on "Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs"

Readers of this blog might have been wondering if I've forgotten about the English Reformation and the Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales since I've been posting so much about Saint John Henry Newman and the Greek Fathers of the Church, books about Newman, etc,. I have not.


I've been reading, to great benefit, Helen C. White's Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs, her survey of the books published before and during the English Reformations during the Tudor dynasty. 

She begins, after a survey of the development of devotion to the martyrs and saints from the Early Church to the Medieval Era, with pre-Henrician Reformation devotion to the saints and books of saints and martyrs, when England was pretty solidly Catholic, through the changes wrought by Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth with their effects on Catholics and of course, the interim of Mary's reign with the reversion to Catholicism and restoration of the heresy laws with their effects on Protestants. While there is plenty of historical narrative, the focus of the book is the books published during that era. Many of those books are stories of martyrdoms, Catholic and Protestant. White maintains an excellent balance of explication and analysis, describing the strengths and weaknesses of the accounts of those martyrdoms.

Table of Contents:

I. The Saint's Legend as a Literary Type
II. "The Golden Legend" [Caxton's 1483 translation of Voragine's Legenda Aurea]
III. The Attack on the Saint's Legend
IV. The Catholic Martyrs under Henry
V. Foxe's Book of Martyrs
VI. Foxe's Ecclesiastical History
VII. The English Mission
VIII. The Triumphs of Death (mya favorite chapter!)
IX. Continuing Classics and Emergent Types

Notes, Bibliography, Index

By documenting the history of the forms and contents of the books saints and martyrs from the reigns of Henry VII to Elizabeth I, White has simultaneously sketched out the history of religion in England during the Tudor Dynasty. I say "sketched out" because she confines her religious narrative to this specific genre, the saints' lives and legends. Only insofar as these books reflect the religious changes (from Catholic unity to Henrician compromises to Calvinist reform to Marian revival to Elizabethan compromise) does she trace that narrative. Because of course how the people of England were supposed to think and write and read about the saints and martyrs, how to model their lives on their examples and ask their intercession in prayer and devotion was affected by the religious changes throughout this dynasty.

I. White begins with a review of the history of saint's lives and legends from the early Church martyrs during the waves of Roman persecution, highlighting Saints Stephen, Perpetua, and Polycarp. Then she looks at the transition from martyrs to confessors, with Saint Martin of Tours for example. She examines Voragine's Legenda Aurea and his systematization of the calendar of the saints and discusses these legends in the Middle Ages as sources of both exhortation and entertainment, noting some of the pitfalls of exaggeration in these lives, their miracles and wonders, etc.

II. Then she looks at William Caxton's translation of Voragine's Legenda Aurea (in the crucial year of 1483: the death of Edward IV, the brief succession and disappearance of his son Edward V, and the beginning of the brief reign of Richard III, succeeded by Henry Tudor as Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty). White highlights The Golden Legend's basic framework and homiletic purpose. Caxton starts with the Apostles, then proceeds to the Martyrs, the Confessors, and the Virgins, exploring themes of wisdom, piety, charity, and miracles.


III. White contrasts the last printing of Caxton's book in 1527 with the first smuggled copies of Tyndale's English New Testament (written on the Continent in 1525 and 1526) before discussing the Humanists's attack on the superstition evident at saint's shrines (Erasmus, and even More, who distinguished between legitimate devotion to the saints and abuse of that devotion). She cites a 1548 sermon preached by Bishop Stephen Gardiner before Edward VI (as a test of his conformity) in which Gardiner highlights the three most important changes in the Church of England: First, the renunciation of the authority of the Pope; Second, the dissolution of the abbeys; Third, that "images [of the saints] were pulled down" (p. 68) She describes the books that accompanied that crucial third change and Henry VIII's own reaction to the over-reaction of some against images and the saints, except for, of course, any devotion to Saint Thomas of Canterbury! Photo above of the candle in Canterbury Cathedral in place of the shrine/tomb that Henry VIII had destroyed.


IV. Now we turn to the Catholic protomartyrs of English Reformation: the Carthusians, Bishop John Fisher, and Thomas More. White opines that "unlike Fisher, More would be remembered today, even if he had never been a martyr" because he was "the greatest genius in his country in that day" (p. 116). She devotes several pages to the different lives of Thomas More, from William Roper's memorial, to Harpsfield, Stapleton, and Ro. Ba., noting their different approaches and contexts, as they wrote about More from their exiles on the Continent (except Harpsfield). There's a great quotation in this chapter about "son Roper": "All this (anecdotes and reflection on More's humor and story-telling) Roper had to refresh his memory, and up to around some ten years before he presumably wrote his story, he had the help of his wife [Margaret]. With her he must often have talked over these things, doubtless finding in the later consequences much help for understanding what had once seemed so puzzling." (p. 122) More's "Dearest Meg" helped build her father's legacy.

V. and VI. In the chapters about John Foxe and his Book of Martyrs and Church history, White pays tribute to his dramatic story-telling, his consistent black-and-white, good vs. evil view of the religious controversies of his day. She also analyses his inability to contemplate any compromise in that conflict. As she notes, Foxe dedicates his works to Elizabeth I, praising her rule over the Church of England, exalting the virtues of her mother Anne--but he cannot contemplate how Henry VIII condemned good men like John Lambert to the stake. He has to find another villain to exculpate a hero and he chooses Bishop Stephen Gardiner as the deceitful persuader against Henry's better Protestant judgement. Foxe could not imagine that Henry VIII believed in the Real Presence and the Sacrifice of the Mass, just as he could not imagine any religious imagery as being anything but an occasion of idolatry. White sums up Foxe's work as the story of great victory, the victory of the State over the Church.

VII. On the other hand, the Catholic Recusants of Elizabeth I's reign could not even imagine a path to victory; their story is "of the resistance of the defeated and the irreconcilable" (p. 197), whose first years under the Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Settlement were kind of waiting game, hoping for a quick succession of Mary of Scotland (after two brief reigns, it could be imagined). Then the Jesuits (and others) Robert Parsons (or Persons) and Edmund Campion launch the English Mission in 1580. 

White devotes requisite attention to both men's books and reputations, but notes that Campion is the real hero (like the comparison and contrast of Fisher and More in chapter IV), because of his daring, the debates in the Tower, and the drama of his capture, torture, and execution. Parsons survives, leaves England never to return, and leads the later English Mission from the Continent. As White notes, he was a tireless writer and educator. She contrasts Parsons life of prose to Campion's life of poetry. Commenting on the narration of Campion's capture, she notes that his betrayer George Elliot's report is "valuable for the light it throws on Recusant life in a large country house in those days" (p. 213) Books attacking and defending Campion--including the poetry of Henry Walpole, inspired to become a missionary priest at his execution--add to his reputation and regard for him among the Catholics of England.

White also highlight a priest's "anonymous Latin diary of what happened to Catholic prisoners in the Tower of London in the years 1580 to 1585", including details about the other prisons which Catholic were incarcerated, and the tortures they endured. The diary contains tantalizingly incomplete information, for example, about the Arden family, Edward and Mary, their daughter Margaret and her husband John Somerville, and the family's resident priest, Father Hugh Hall, all accused of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth I, and condemned to death. We know that Edward and John were executed, but what of the women and the priest? The diary does not tell.

VIII. This chapter is almost entirely devoted to the character, works, and reputation of the Jesuit priest and martyr Robert Southwell, particularly to how his use of Saint Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises helped prepare him for the sufferings he endured. White continues the pattern of compare/contrast between Campion and Southwell.

She notes that they were "two very different types of men" and those differences represent "some important differences" in their times in the English Mission. White says that Campion's brilliance is at the "full tide of the high Elizabethan genius, with all its optimistic energy and color and dramatic edge" while Southwell's genius is "something more withdrawn, more reflective, more solitary, more ecstatic; he belongs to a later, more complicated, more shadowed world" (p. 240) and sums him up on page 241: Southwell "was not only a mystic, but a poet." And as a poet, Southwell had the "metaphysical power of organization and the metaphysical power of the revelation of the heart of the matter through a lightning flash of the continued reality in momentary detail." (my italics) We should recall that White also wrote The Metaphysical Poets: A Study in Religious Experience, published by Macmillan in 1936.

White's analysis of Southwell's poetic and mystic vision and his practice of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises reminded me of Anne R. Sweeney's Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia: redrawing the English lyric landscape, 1586-95, which I reviewed here. Sweeney explores more fully White's insights into Southwell's experiences of the art and culture of Counter-Reformation Rome, especially in the first chapter, "Rome: the discernment of angels". By the way, Sweeney included White's Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs in her bibliography. And both White and Sweeney (in chapter 2, "The Spiritual Exercises: the 'inward eie') explore the influence of Southwell's use of the Ignatian method of meditation on his preparation for capture, torture, and execution--and in his poetry.

One reason for the difference between the worlds of Campion and Southwell, measured only a few years, is the increasingly desperate situation of Catholics in England. New recusant laws, the 1581 Acts of Persuasion, declaring conversion/reversion to Catholicism, called "reconciliation with Rome" an act of High Treason, and the Act of 1585 against the Jesuits and Seminary priests, making their return to England also an act of Treason--plus the horror of the Babington Plot and its aftermath, the execution of Mary of Scotland and the 1588 Spanish Armada with the State's reaction of multiple executions--when even those Catholics who proved the answer to the "Bloody Question" was that they wanted to fight to defend England from the Armada received no consideration! What cause for optimism did Southwell have?

So he wrote works of comfort and consolation to the Catholics of England: Epistle of Comfort, written for Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, held in the Tower for years under a sentence of death, A Short Rule of Good Life, Triumphs over Death, and a Humble Supplication to Queen Elizabeth--all to help them deal with their sorrows through their sorrows. White particularly highlights the popularity of Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears and St. Peter's Complaint, reprinted and imitated often. 

It's really a masterful chapter.

IX. This chapter describes how saints' lives and legends returned to English Anglican literature, adapting the pre-Reformation traditions to the contemporary Elizabethan standards. Thus carefully moderated poems about the Blessed Virgin Mary as the Mother of God or of an English hero like St. George could be written and published. At the turn of the century, in the last years and months of Elizabeth I's reign, chroniclers and biographers could look back on the past and write about Reformation heroes. They weren't to be canonized saints for devotion, of course, but they could be models for imitation. 

I look forward to reading White's other Tudor book, on Books of Private Devotion.

Friday, October 11, 2024

Preview: Newman and the Greek Fathers: Mystery

In our discussion on Monday, October 14 of how, according to Father Ian Ker, the Greek Fathers of the Church influenced Saint John Henry Newman on the Son Rise Morning Show, we (Matt Swaim or Anna Mitchell and I) will look at the fifth theme of Mystery. Please tune in at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central DST/7:50 a.m. Eastern DST here or catch the podcast later. 

As a reminder, the first four topics we've discussed are: The Incarnation, The Resurrection and Ascension, the Indwelling of the Spirit/Justification, and the Sacraments. As we've examined them, we've seen the connections among them: the Incarnation makes the Passion, Death, Resurrection, Ascension and Descent of the Holy Spirit possible. The Descent of the Holy Spirit prepares us for the Indwelling of the Spirit, which comes to us through the Sacraments, starting with Baptism, etc.

Perhaps this last of Father Ker's themes connects them all. No matter how the Fathers of the Church sought to understand and put into words what the Catholic Church from Apostolic times believed about the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the Indwelling of the Spirit, and the Sacraments, they all remain mysteries, beyond our human ability to thoroughly comprehend and explain. The more we try to explain them and make them comprehensible to our limited human reason, we may stumble into at least a stance of material heresy.

Newman certainly saw that danger in the doctrinal crises the Fathers of the Church faced in the early Church Councils, called to deal with divisive heresies about the Person of Our Incarnate Lord. But as Father Ker notes, he saw those dangers in his own time, among both Evangelicals and High-and-Dry Anglicans, the latter characterized by High theology and Low liturgy. Yes, Newman valued Reason and wanted to develop intellectual excellence (the "Imperial Intellect"), but he recognized its limitations when it comes to God's mysteries.

This is another insight we can trace to Newman's study of Saint Athanasius: "mystery is the necessary note of divine revelation" Newman states in his Selected Treatises of Saint Athanasius, Volume 2, "that is, mystery subjectively to the human mind . . ." continuing with these words of the saint: 
"Such illustrations and such images," says Athanasius, "has Scripture proposed, that, considering the inability of human nature to comprehend God, we might be able to form ideas even from these, however poorly and dimly, as far as is attainable." Orat. ii. 32, [amudros], vid. also [amudra]; ii. 17. (p. 92, under the heading "Economical Language")

If you go to the alphabetical listing of Newman's sermons, Anglican and Catholic, at the newmanreader.org website, you'll see several sermons with word "mystery" or "mysteries" in their title:

PPS1-16 The Christian Mysteries
PPS2-18 Mysteries in Religion
DMC-13 Mysteries of Nature and of Grace
PPS4-19 The Mysteriousness of Our Present Being
DMC-14 The Mystery of Divine Condescension
PPS5-7 The Mystery of Godliness
PPS6-24 The Mystery of the Holy Trinity

Or look at Rickaby's Index on the same site under M for Mysteries!

For example, in "The Mysteriousness of Our Present Being", Newman told his congregation:
There is nothing, according as we are given to see and judge of things, which will make a greater difference in the temper, character, and habits of an individual, than the circumstance of his holding or not holding the Gospel to be mysterious. (p. 292)
This long quotation (excerpted slightly) from "The Gift of the Spirit", offers a summary of what Newman wanted his hearers to understand about Mystery and the Catholic Christian Faith:
Till we {268} understand that the gifts of grace are unseen, supernatural, and mysterious, we have but a choice between explaining away the high and glowing expressions of Scripture, or giving them that rash, irreverent, and self-exalting interpretation, which is one of the chief errors of this time. [Newman then compares "men of awakened and sensitive minds" who are "led to place the life of a Christian, which "is hid with Christ in God," in a sort of religious ecstasy" with "sensible and sober-minded men, offended at such excesses" who think that the Gift of the Spirit "does nothing more than make us decent and orderly members of society"] . . .

For ourselves, in proportion as we realize that higher view of the subject, which we may humbly trust is the true one, let us be careful to act up to it. Let us adore the Sacred Presence within us with all fear, and "rejoice with trembling." Let us offer up our best gifts in sacrifice to Him who, instead of abhorring, has taken up his abode in these sinful hearts of ours. Prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, "good works and alms-deeds," a bold and true confession and a self-denying walk, are the ritual of worship by which we serve Him in these His Temples. How the distinct and particular words of faith avail to our final acceptance, we know not; neither do we know how they are efficacious in changing our wills and characters, which, through God's grace, they certainly do. All we know is, that as we persevere in them, the inward light grows brighter and brighter, and God manifests Himself in us in a way the world knows not of. In this, then, consists our whole duty, first in contemplating Almighty God, as in Heaven, so in our hearts and souls; and next, while we contemplate Him, in acting towards and for Him in the works of every day; in viewing by faith His glory without and within us, and in acknowledging it by our obedience. Thus we {270} shall unite conceptions the most lofty concerning His majesty and bounty towards us, with the most lowly, minute, and unostentatious service to Him.
Father Ker concludes this section on the Influence of the Greek Fathers by noting that this sense of mystery and awe Newman learned of Saint Athanasius and others is why Newman is often so spiritually and morally demanding--as demonstrated in the excerpt above--in his sermons:
If believers are really temples of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul teaches, then it is practically sacrilegious for a baptized Christian not to be living the life of the Spirit. (p. 41)
I'd suggest that we can see how the "Fathers made [Newman] Catholic" by looking at the last chapter of the Apologia pro Vita Sua, when he explains his religious position after being received in to the Catholic Church. Newman states that he believes, for example, in the Catholic Church's teaching on Transubstantiation to describe how Jesus is sacramentally, really, and substantially present in Holy Communion when it seems like the Host is still like bread and the Blood still like wine, which is still mysterious:
People say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is difficult to believe; I did not believe the doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no difficulty in believing it, as soon as I believed that the Catholic Roman Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared this doctrine to be part of the original revelation. It is difficult, impossible, to imagine, I grant;—but how is it difficult to believe? . . . What do I know of substance or matter? just as much as the greatest philosophers, and {240} that is nothing at all;"—so much is this the case, that there is a rising school of philosophy now, which considers phenomena to constitute the whole of our knowledge in physics. [Think of the "string theories" of recent years!] The Catholic doctrine leaves phenomena alone. It does not say that the phenomena go; on the contrary, it says that they remain; nor does it say that the same phenomena are in several places at once. It deals with what no one on earth knows any thing about, the material substances themselves. [Christ's Real Presence, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in Holy Communion]
He also comments on the Mystery of the Holy Trinity:
And, in like manner, of that majestic Article of the Anglican as well as of the Catholic Creed,—the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. What do I know of the Essence of the Divine Being? I know that my abstract idea of three is simply incompatible with my idea of one; but when I come to the question of concrete fact, I have no means of proving that there is not a sense in which one and three can equally be predicated of the Incommunicable God.

Both are Mysteries we assent to without being able to prove them by human reason alone "through God's grace" and our cooperation with it. That of course, why Newman wrote--after years of wanting to write--An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent as explained in this draft, unpublished preface, to demonstrate that it is not unreasonable to assent to mysteries like them.

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image Credit (Public Domain); The Trinity, Guillaume Le Rouge, 1510 Book of Hours