Preview: Blessed John Henry Newman on Miracles

On Monday, September 23, Matt Swaim and I will talk about Blessed John Henry Newman and Miracles in our Santo Subito series on the Son Rise Morning Show. The anticipation of Newman's canonization is building up: this week I received the schedule of events to be broadcast on EWTN in October; the English oratories and many Newmanian organizations are presenting programs and publishing articles, posting podcasts, etc., etc. Since two miracles, one for his beatification, one for canonization, have been investigated and accepted by the Church, it seems appropriate to look at Newman's thoughts on miracles.

He lived in a country and a time that did not believe in miracles. Anglicans and dissenting Protestants thought that miracles did not occur; there was even doubt about the miracles of Jesus and His Apostles recounted in the New Testament. Certainly the Catholic belief in saints and miracles after the New Testament era was detestable to the rational minds of Victorian England, indicating the foolish superstition of Catholics, and demonstrating the "priestcraft" that held the Catholic laity in ignorance and obedience.

As an Anglican, Newman himself at first doubted that miracles had occurred in the Early Church after the Apostolic era--but through his study of the Fathers of the Church, he began to change his mind, as demonstrated in the two essays he wrote about miracles, as described by the University of Notre Dame Press:

The essays in this volume were written when John Henry Newman was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He wrote the first, on biblical miracles "The Miracles of Scripture," in 1825-26, as a relatively young man; the other, "The Miracles of Early Ecclesiastical History," was written in 1842-43. A comparison of the two essays displays a shift in Newman's theological stances. In the earlier essay, Newman argues in accordance with the theology of evidence of his time, maintaining that the age of miracles was limited to those recorded in the Old Testament scriptures and in the Gospels and Acts. He asserts that biblical miracles served to demonstrate the divine inspiration of biblical revelation and to attest to the divinity of Christ. However, with the end of the apostolic age, the age of miracles came to an end; miracles reported from the early ages of the Church Newman dismissed as suspicious and possibly fraudulent. With this view, Newman entered into an ongoing debate between the skepticism of Hume and Paine and its continuation in the utilitarianism of Bentham, on the one hand, and the views of Christian apologists rebutting Hume's arguments, on the other. In "The Miracles of Early Ecclesiastical History," Newman can be seen as coming closer to accepting the doctrines of the Catholic Church. He rejects the stance he took in "The Miracles of Scripture," now arguing for a continuity of sacred history between the biblical and ecclesiastical periods. He had clearly abandoned the position of "evidence theologians" that miracles ended after the time of the Apostles. Newman's movement between the writing of the two essays is essentially a growing into a deeper awareness of the Church as a divine society in whose life miracles and supernatural gifts were to be expected.

And as Newman further demonstrated to the Lay Brothers of the Oratory in Birmingham in 1851, he understood the First Principle by which Anglicans and other Protestants rejected--and indeed, were repulsed by--the Catholic belief in miracles, including Catholics praying for miracles. In the seventh chapter of The Present Position of Catholics in England, he sums it up:

The Protestant, I say, laughs at the very idea of miracles or supernatural acts as occurring at this day; his First Principle is rooted in him; he repels from him the idea of miracles; he laughs at the notion of evidence for them; one is just as likely as another; they are all false. Why? Because of his First Principle: there are no miracles since the Apostles. Here, indeed, is a short and easy way of getting rid of the whole subject, not by reason, but by a First Principle which he calls reason. Yes, it is reason, granting his First Principle is true; it is not reason, supposing his First Principle is false. It is reason, if the private judgment of an individual, or of a sect, or of a philosophy, or of a nation, be synonymous with reason; it is not reason, if reason is something not local, nor temporal, but universal. Before he advances a step in his argument, he ought to prove his First Principle true; he does not attempt to do so, he takes it for granted; and he proceeds to apply it, gratuitous, personal, peculiar as it is, to all our accounts of miracles taken together, and thereupon and thereby triumphantly rejects them all. This, forsooth, is his spontaneous judgment, his instinctive feeling, his common sense,—a mere private opinion of his own, a Protestant opinion; a lecture-room opinion; not a world-wide opinion, not an instinct ranging through time and space, but an assumption and presumption, which, by education and habit, he has got to think as certain, as much of an axiom, as that two and two make four; and he looks down upon us, and bids us consider ourselves beaten, all because the savour of our statements and narratives and reports and legends is inconsistent with his delicate Protestant sense,—all because our conclusions are different, not from our principles and premisses, but from his.

And now for the structure he proceeds to raise on this foundation of sand. If, he argues, in matter of fact, there be a host of stories about relics and miracles circulated in the Catholic Church, which, as a matter of First Principle, cannot be true; to what must we attribute them? indubitably to enormous stupidity on the one hand, and enormous roguery on the other. This, observe, is an immediate and close inference:—clever men must see through the superstition; those who do not see through it must be dolts. Further, since religion is the subject-matter of the alleged fictions, they must be what are called pious frauds, for the sake of gain and power. Observe, my Brothers, there is in the Church a vast tradition and testimony about miracles: how is it to be accounted for? If miracles can take place, then the truth of the miracle will be a natural explanation of the report, just as the fact of a man dying satisfactorily accounts for the news that he is dead; but the Protestant cannot so explain it, because he thinks miracles cannot take place; so he is necessarily driven, by way of accounting for the report of them, to impute that report to fraud. He cannot help himself. I repeat it; the whole mass of accusations which Protestants bring against us under this head, Catholic credulity, imposture, pious frauds, hypocrisy, priestcraft, this vast and varied superstructure of imputation, you see, all rests on an assumption, on an opinion of theirs, for which they offer no kind of proof. What then, in fact, do they say more than this, If Protestantism be true, you Catholics are a most awful set of knaves?—Here, at least, is a most intelligible and undeniable position.

Newman tells the Brothers of the Oratory that this is a great divide between Catholics and Protestants in England because Catholics and Protestants begin with very different First Principles, and it is something that they will have to deal with as laity living in a Protestant country and defending Catholic First Principles:

Observe then, we affirm that the Supreme Being has wrought miracles on earth ever since the time of the Apostles: Protestants deny it. Why do we affirm, why do they deny? we affirm it on a First Principle, they deny it on a First Principle; and on either side the First Principle is made to be decisive of the question. Our First Principle is contradictory of theirs; if theirs be true, we are mistaken; if ours be true, they are mistaken. They take for granted that their First Principle is true; we take for granted that our First Principle is true. Till ours is disproved, we have as much right to consider it true as they to consider theirs true; till theirs is proved, they have as little ground for saying that we go against reason, as for boasting that they go according to it. For our First Principle is our reason, in the same sense in which theirs is their reason, and it is quite as good a reason. Both they and we start with the miracles of the Apostles [Note 2]; and then their First Principle or presumption, against our miracles, is this, "What God did once, He is not likely to do again;" while our First Principle or presumption, for our miracles, is this, "What God did once, He is likely to do again." They say, It cannot be supposed He will work many miracles; we, It cannot be supposed He will work few.

I am not aiming at any mere sharp or clever stroke against them; I wish to be serious and to investigate the real state of the case, and I feel what I am saying very strongly. Protestants say, miracles are not likely to occur often; we say they are likely to occur often. The two parties, you see, start with contradictory principles, and they determine the particular miracles, which are the subject of dispute, by their respective principles, without looking to such testimony as may be brought in their favour. They do not say, "St. Francis, or St. Antony, or St. Philip Neri did no miracles, for the evidence for them is worth nothing," or "because what looked like a miracle was not a miracle;" no, but they say, "It is impossible they should have wrought miracles." Bring before the Protestant the largest mass of evidence and testimony in proof of the miraculous liquefaction of St. Januarius's blood at Naples, let him be urged by witnesses of the highest character, chemists of the first fame, circumstances the most favourable for the detection of imposture, coincidences, and confirmations the most close and minute and indirect, he will not believe it; his First Principle blocks belief. On the other hand, diminish the evidence ever so much, provided you leave some, and reduce the number of witnesses and circumstantial proof; yet you would not altogether wean the Catholic's mind from belief in it; for his First Principle encourages such belief. Would any amount of evidence convince the Protestant of the miraculous motion of a Madonna's eyes? is it not to him in itself, prior to proof, simply incredible? would he even listen to the proof? His First Principle settles the matter; no wonder then that the whole history of Catholicism finds so little response in his intellect or sympathy in his heart. It is as impossible that the notion of the miracle should gain admittance into his imagination, as for a lighted candle to remain burning, when dipped into a vessel of water. The water puts it out.

More on Monday on how Newman prepared the Brothers of the Oratory to face this divide in nineteenth century England.