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:
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
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